8 Minute Memoir – Day 1 – I Remember When

I stood waist deep in the font, small like a hot tub, water warm like a bath. I was dressed in neck to ankle white, my jumpsuit—baggy and sexless—cinched only slightly at the waist. The zipper flipped up at my neck. I remember it bothered me that you could notice it sticking up in the picture of me and my dad taken just before or just after—it must have been just before, my hair was dry—the main event. I remember my dad standing next to me in the water. I remember his hand in mine and his other hand–I get the lefts and rights mixed up trying to figure out how it all went, it’s been so long since I’ve seen anyone baptized this way–behind my head when I went under. I don’t remember what he said. I don’t remember what I thought. I remember plugging my nose. I remember meeting with my bishop a few weeks earlier, to be interviewed and found worthy to become a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There’s a twist in my perception. In my memories of the baptism, I might as well be a teenager. I am autonomous, grown. I am the same person I am now. In my memories of the bishop’s office, I am a little girl.